Bring your email marketing activities next to your KPIs in Context
With Context API you can integrate in minutes and automatically send relevant business events to your Context dashboards.
With our API and some coding skills, you have full control over what you send to Context.
However, if you don't have the needed coding skills, you will also be able to do it with just a few clicks, taking advantage of tools such as IFTTT or Zapier.
In this example, we're going to see how to track your MailChimp's marketing campaigns in your Context dashboards without writing a single line of code.
Context meets Mailchimp, thanks to our API & Zapier
Marketing campaigns and newsletter are, for sure, one of those events that we, as digital marketers, need to track with lots of love, as they can potentially have a huge impact over our KPIs.
So, let's see how can we bring these annotations to our reports without writing or coding.
First things first: what is Zapier?
Zapier is a very easy to use automation service that allows you to move info between your web apps automatically
Basically, it's a platform that helps you connect most of the apps you use every day, automating many tasks without development skills.
A few examples of what you could do with Zapier:
- Save new Typeform entries to a Google Spreadsheet
- Create rows on Google Sheets for new Facebook Lead Ads leads
- Create Trello cards from new Google Sheets rows
- POST new MailChimp campaigns to a webhook URL
Let's see the last example in details: If a new MailChimp campaign is sent, send an event to my Context dashboard.
1. Create your Context account
We're still in private beta mode. So, if you didn't make it up to this stage, feel free to request free early access for our public beta. Coming soon...
2. Create your Zapier account
Go to Zapier and create your account. It's free.
3. Create a new Zap
Click on the big and red "Make a Zap" button in the navigation menu:
4. Choose a trigger app
Time to select the trigger for our action. In our example, we will use MailChimp as the service that will trigger our desired action. So let's filter by "MailChimp" and select the service.
5. Go for "New campaign" option
We have many options to choose from within MailChimp. We're interested in the "New campaign" option.
6. Connect your account and test that everything works fine
Time to connect your Zapier and MailChimp accounts so everything runs smoothly:
7. Choose your List and your Status
They are optional but very important.
Specify a "List" if you only want the action to be triggered when new campaigns are launched to a specific MailChimp list. If you want to track campaigns to all lists, leave it blank.
The "Status" field is especially important. It's an optional field also, but you need to change it to "Sent". If not, you will also get annotations in your Context dashboards when campaigns are created, not when they are sent.
8. Pick a sample campaign to set up the Zap
This step will be useful for the next configuration requirements:
9. Time to create the action step
Choose the only option available at this moment:
10. Filter by "Webhooks"
11. Select "Post" option
Copy the URL from Context:
Paste the URL in Zapier:
Choose "json" as "Payload type"
On the data section, do as follows:
- title: it's the annotation title you will see in your Context reports. This field is mandatory. We'll use the name of our campaign in MailChimp.
- category: it's an attribute you can use to categorize your annotations in a way that fits your needs. This field is mandatory. We'll use "Email MK campaign".
- description: you can use this field to add additional details about the annotation. This field is mandatory. We'll use the subject of our MailChimp campaign.
- publishDate: This field is mandatory. We'll capture the date that the campaign was sent.
- url: if you want to match your annotation with a given URL for further details, you can add it here. This field is optional. We'll capture the archive URL to be able to access email details from Context.
The rest of the fields will remain as they are. We can continue.
12. Ready to test Post to Webhooks by Zapier
13. Name your Zap and turn it on
14. You're done!
And that's it. Next time you send a new email campaign to your subscribers you will see an annotation in your context reports:
